skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People don't exist in a vacuum, though. Unlike when he was a teenager, his workaholic attitude affects others in a workplace environment. It affects the company culture and puts pressure on people to work more to keep up. It makes otherwise good workers feel guilty that they don't work more.
> functional programmers get to express their ideas as code

The flaw is in us. Our ideas are malformed and flawed. Simply expressing ideas is not enough.
There is a big crediblity difference between taking random classes and completing a program in a university.

The university has the onus to hire credible teachers, and to maintain a high reputation. You're paying for the standards they apply. Some universities aren't worth their weight and some are. The information that they have is out there. This has not changed. Textbooks have been arround for a while. Additionally professional teachers have the ability to communicate the material affectively.

Online classes can't guarantee a level of understanding of the material. Additionally online classes will never be able to guarantee that the person who signed up for the class is the actual one that gets the credit.
Not exactly the same, but they copied a lot from GitHub.
Admittedly I'm nitpicking an explicit design decision of a fantastic achievement (Clojure), but when studying it, it bothered me that Java/JVM stuff actively surfaced rather than being entirely a concern of the implementers. I had/have never programmed Java and have no interest in it, but nonetheless had to start caring about what java.blah.Things and their API were; what JAR files, Classpaths, Classloaders were all about; etc. For me, this alien stuff nestled in and around Clojure-proper brought a scattered feeling to what otherwise felt very tight and coherent.
Bitbucket's self-hosted enterprise product Stash is priced aggressively. It's free for open source projects, non-profits and classrooms. For small teams (up to 10 users), it costs just $10/year, all in, and you get the source code.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/pricing

Contrast with Github where the minimum purchase is 1 seat pack (up to 20 users), costing $5000/year, and you don't get any access to the the source code.

https://enterprise.github.com/pricing
A quote from the article: "If all the programmers I've worked with in my career had had good writing instructions, they would have been forced at an early age to think clearly, to communicate complex thoughts, and to combine simple ideas into compound ideas. These ideas, later written as code, would have resulted in better products."

To expand a bit on what the author is saying, if programmers were taught how to communicate clearly in everyday language, they would instinctively take at least one review pass at what they've just written and edit it for clarity. And later, when they learned how to program, they would review their code in the same way -- with a desire to clarify code that might work but that's neither clear nor optimal. This is especially important when programmers work in teams.

I often correct people's writing here, a behavior that creates no small amount of annoyance. But when I correct people's code, for some reason the rules are different -- the second is accepted, but the first isn't.

I see code and natural language as the same, equally open to correction and improvement, but it seems most people look at poor writing skill as a sort of natural handicap, congenital, embarrassing and rude to bring up. That's too bad, because in many ways code and natural language work by the same rules, and both are open to improvement using the same methods.
It feels like the author picked the 8 hour work day. I don't see that as part of the overall discussion on balance.

The main point of balance is that you are a more complete human being when you participate in a wider range of activities. Even if that just means you're a better developer because you stepped away for an hour or a week and got a new perspective. Just because you're not miserable only doing primarily one thing doesn't mean you wouldn't be happier if you forced yourself to learn or see or try new things at regular intervals. You'd most likely be much more interesting to those around you too.
This is extremely true. I love the phase where you are just building putting pieces together, solving interesting problems. Then QA comes in and tears your shit apart, gives extremely unhelpful advice and generally just kick over your sandcastle.
We've had side-by-side diffing for about a year. What the redesign has (apparently) done, is bring forth those features, as we're seeing more and more people discover them today.
One way in which it might actually help significantly is if it motivates coding in ways that are better structured, and the sophisticated run-times can take good advantage of this.
Not sure if I agree with the author here. Yes it is true that if u love what u do, it doesn't feel like a burden and might have a feeling of balance there. But even then, I want my personal life which means being able to spend time doing other things and not just work.

The author talks about his teenage days when he would rather do math and not watch x files. That's fine. But what about ppl who have kids and want to go home and spend time with them instead of working which btw they love.

And that's my point. Just because u love your work, doesn't mean u have a balance. I will rather call it obsession.
Self hosted password manager on GAE
Facebook Gets a Little Less “Free” for Members
This article is mostly newspaper fetishisim about the company's owners. What HN is interested in was contained in a single, unsurprising paragraph. I've cut it up to comment:

One reason that Indian newspapers thrive is the absence of digital competition. Less than ten per cent of the population has access to the Internet, and, with two-thirds of the population surviving on less than two dollars per day, expensive smartphones and tablets aren’t about to replace print media as the news-reading platform of choice.

So the state of today's Indian newspaper industry is the same as USA's in about 2000.

Also, Indian papers are cheap, costing between five and ten cents daily. There are few newsstands in India—only five per cent of papers are sold over the counter—and home delivery is free, paid for by the publishers.

As philanthropic as "paid for by the publishers" sounds, it means the delivery fee is paid for indirectly, instead of charging it explicitly on the bill. I think the article is trying to say that newspaper delivery is expected in India.

The actual price of each paper is even lower, because of what Indians call raddi, their recycling program. Subscribers save their newspapers, which are picked up by raddiwallahs each month; the customer receives about ten cents per pound, and the raddiwallahs sell the bundles back to the paper companies to be recycled.*

The first result on DDG says a Sunday newspaper can weigh nearly one pound in large cities. Assuming the other 6 pages per day combined weigh another pound means recycling can pay for a couple of free newspapers per week.

This makes me wonder about CPK rates in India.
Your Brain on Jane Austen
I know they've been very open about why they're using major revision numbers for minor features. I don't like it when Chrome does it either. I just don't like the arms race that is developing to have the higher revision number. I just get a little disappointed when I see a new major number and the changelog is minor additions and bugfixes.

Just because Mozilla has their reason for making the change doesn't mean everyone has to be happy about the change. I'm not complaining about Firefox, I'm complaining about the number, and the corruption of what that number is supposed to mean.
I used to program all the time in high school. I thought I was happy.

Then I went to college, met all sorts of people, had lots of experiences, and realized how narrow my life, and concept of happiness was.

So when I hear people talk about how much they love their work, that's their own balance... I can't help but wonder if they just haven't learned how great the other parts of life are. And how much a wider range of experiences can make their work part better as well.
Web Apps are a very real part of the future of the web. The fact that this space exists in the first place whereby there was only desktop apps previously should be testament enough to that. I may not personally agree with Mozilla in regards to the role of web apps, but I think that we all agree, it's better to be in a position to allow users to make their own minds up rather than go off of what a few loud naysayers want.
These guys have been working for a while on this, and I know they have some other ideas that aren't even in the app yet. Looking forward to seeing them add to the app.

It's a beautiful app, and I wouldn't be surprised if it won designs from Apple.

-sc
I think Kubrick would have been happy to hand off the camera to another operator so he could be free to scrutinize other things. He very obviously did this with many other jobs on the set. However, there was a lack of ability to communicate with precision what he wanted done.

Perhaps this is because the degrees of freedom are so numerous in handheld camerawork that it was not feasible.

In any event things like this are failures to communicate, and any time you have to do this, it should be treated as so. Sometimes it is more efficient to do something yourself than to communicate it to someone else; if that is the case more often than not, the most efficient thing to do might be to improve your communication skills.
Her high school life sounds sad. If she really had a fulfilling social life in high school she wouldn't feel the need to tell us all how great it was that she didn't go to parties. It reminds me of people who are constantly broadcasting to everyone how happy they are. Chances are, they're not.
i'd love to dig into this more to see if there's anything we can do today to help you with this scenario and, if not, what we might do in future. will you please email me at kinectninja <at> microsoft?
People were freaking out over terminator seeds, claiming it was going to (somehow) spread to other things and end all life on earth.

Monsanto responded by pledging not to use terminator seeds. The anti-GMO crowd got exactly what they wanted. [1]

It's churlish for the mob to claim they were bad for wanting to use terminator seeds, and then claim that they don't have protection because they didn't use terminator seeds.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/465969.stm
So how do I browse projects that are hosted on BitBucket? How can I search for projects by language?

All I see on the main page are screenshots and signup links. Why should I sign up if I can't even test drive the site by browsing existing projects?

Would be nice to have an "Explore" feature similar to GitHub.
The Flow – Programming in Ecstasy « Psygrammer
SHOW EXPLAIN - Analyze a running query
Hasn't that been a feature from day one. Are you sure you haven't got the option ticked that forces links to open in external tabs/windows?
So, that's great for you and all, but what the fuck does it have to do with the article?
For me the experience of managing open source repositories gets worse with recent bitbucket updates to the point that I'm in process of moving my open-source to github.

How one is supposed to find what have bitbucketer done? Visit e.g. Ian Bicking's account: https://bitbucket.org/ianb . Is it easy to find out why are so many people following Ian? What repositories are interesting? "bbdocs" with 4 followers? From the first page of Ian's repositories I know "dozer", did Ian wrote it? Click. Oh, it's an outdated fork.

Just compare the direction Github took at its recent redesign. GitHub folks made user profiles act like resume. The repositories are visually big, it is clear what repositories are popular, what repos are active, etc. It is also clear what a person is into: repositories are sorted by 'last modified' date. There is "Explore" section with trending repos (bitbucket's Explore is a joke) and so on.

Bitbucket instead removed follower counts and fork counts from the repositories list; repositories are sorted alphabetically now; there is no way to see who the user follows or who user is followed by.

I was missing important ticket updates at bitbucket several times because the newsfeed is not "infinite"; "Inbox" messages count stops working sometimes, etc.

There are things bitbucket is better at: e.g. github links to source code lines are awful (they don't contain changeset information in URL by default and so easily become outdated); there is no way to specify repo language in github (one of my recent Python repos was in a "Top followed this week" for a C language, that's great of course but..)

Don't get me wrong, bitbucket becomes nicer and nicer, I'm still a heavy bitbucket user and we use a paid account at work; but it seems that the open source support (code discovery and presentation) is not their priority right now, or at least they act so.
I haven't. I'll check it out. Thanks for the rec.
I think even the Firefox team would agree with you in saying that their version numbers are now meaningless. Which is why they are slowly removing the version number from every user visible interaction.

The point is that Firefox never wants to ever have a "major release" again. Small frequent changes work much better for everybody. So what are their options? Keep incrementing the minor number? The major major number then becomes meaningless and you end up with absurdities like "2.6.39".

I think the solution they chose is much better than the one Linus chose. What's the difference between 2.6.39 and 3.0? About the same as 2.6.38 to 2.6.39, and 3.0 to 3.1. Eventually they'll get up to 3.BIG and he'll call it 4.0 for no particularly reason.
For the record, I just bought "Javascript and jQuery: The Missing Manual 2e" and am impressed with its style of teaching.

Yes, as someone who has programming background, it sometimes seems to be directed at those with no programming experience, but it still helps to start from the beginning and walk through.

As someone with a some CSS, HTML knowledge and no CLUE what the DOM was or how javascript interacts with HTML/CSS, it's been a good few days for me.
Like many programming languages, Clojure was designed to solve the problems that its implementer (Rich Hickey) was having. That is, Rich wanted a powerful, fast and complete Lisp implementation centered around concurrent processing to run on the JVM. That the JVM is front and center is a design feature. It's not a feature that will appeal to everyone, but it's a feature nonetheless.
With the "Tree Style Tab" extension you can manage tons of tabs in a comfortable and ordered way.
BookShout: A universal bookshelf to import your books from Amazon or B&N
In a reply to someone else, I did complain about Chrome's version numbers. That too bothers me. I have to imagine this issue is similar to people who complain about Windows RT's app model. Apple did it from day one, so there are few complaints. Microsoft switched to it just to keep up, which causes a lot of complaints. In this situation, Chrome is Apple who did it from day one without causing a major fuss, and Firefox is Microsoft who switched to it to great fanfare in order to keep up with the competition.
For human-friendly URIs, I would've liked to see Doug Crockford's Base32 encoding (http://www.crockford.com/wrmg/base32.html) instead of hexadecimal. Case-insensitive, but still more compact than hex.
Try Asana, also a collaborative to-do list but with many features. Not overly many features, just exactly the ones you need (or that was my experience anyway). Free also for business use up to 30 people, which is very reasonable I think.
I cannot believe that this opinion is so prevalent.

First of all, cheating is really easy on Coursera without having to appeal to public solutions posted by somebody else. You can get private help without anybody knowing anything about it and you can do so in a really efficient way, since there's absolutely nobody watching you.

Coursera courses are for people willing to learn something, providing certificates was stupid in the first place, poisoning the well for everybody that's there for the right reasons. The topics are not exactly PhD-level, you can probably find 80% of all the answers you need by doing stupid Google searches and even if we were talking about PhD dissertations, cheating is still possible, the only difference being the difficulty threshold.

That cheating is so easy on Coursera, "give me an A" is precisely what's going on for people that are there, not for the learning experience, but for an A.

Which is why the value in these courses is only for personal growth and personal gratification. I would never look at such certificates on a resume, because such certificates are even less valuable (from a market perspective) than a piece of toilet paper, because at least a piece of toilet paper is useful for something while at work. And no, interest in subjects such as "Scala" is not enough, because such proxies for performance can be easily discovered and hence gamed.

Also, the gratification comes from knowing that you worked and that you passed the tests. The certificate only holds personal value if this condition is met.

And in the context of Coursera, that certificate does not make sense anyway. If you follow the forums, you'll get a lot of people asking if they can still join the course with late submissions, providing reasons for why they are late in the hope that staff will make exceptions (they've taken long trips, the dog ate their homework, etc...) - which is just a mindbogglingly dumb thing to do.
And unlike in previous eras of Firefox, extensions are not typically disabled by the version bump.
I get what he's saying, but I think he answered it himself, when he questioned if he was being overly dramatic. He is being really over-dramatic.

I would love to hear about any occupation where the negatives aren't run into in a similar way that he describes programming.

That being said, the one thing that I dislike about programmers in general is that I think we believe we sound smarter if we figure out ways how an idea won't work. It's annoying when you come up with a new idea, and all you hear is a litany of reasons why it won't work.

The most important lesson I learned was soon after I had moved to the Valley, and I gave a suggestion to one of the senior engineers. Instead of shooting it down immediately like others loved doing, he simply said something like "Okay, I'm not sold on it but give it a shot." I had been prepared for a lengthy argument over why my idea was good, and I was taken aback at his immediate open-mindedness. It's something I've taken to heart since then.
In my opinion startups are about speed. That doesn't mean you have to work 14 hour days 7 days a week. It does mean that if some obstacle clears at 5:05 pm on a Friday, then you do the work to get to the next obstacle, even if it means you miss dinner with the family.

But if you're ahead of the game on a Monday morning at 9am, then sleep in, or go to a movie, or whatever. Because the best way to go fast is to be enthusiastic about what you're doing.
Hopefully someone will take on the enormous undertaking that will be fixing Panorama/Tab Candy to work properly. Where's Santa? That's all I want for Christmas.
Humans can adapt to almost anything.

But for me, it is a matter of not caring about the bugs but enjoying fixing them.
Looks great. I've been using Bitbucket for a while and I've always hoped they redesigned their website. Now with the pull requests and all, it looks more usable. Although I find GitHub more beautiful and usable, I'd definitely recommend Bitbucket too.
If you loath to do something then it induces stress. However, if you love your project then you're more likely to ensure that ship moves forward, even if it means doing tasks that you did not want to do originally.
Sounds like a trivial extension.
This is what we've landed on as a default - just seems kinda wonky. As if MacGuyver were handling our incoming $ or something.
Gleb from Backblaze here. Glad you're enjoying the service and the spec design. As for the faceplates, our welding skills aren't great either. However, the company we had cut our steel case for us (www.protocase.com) will cut a custom logo for you into your faceplate as well.
If I right click on a link, I see options "Open link in new tab" and "Open link in new window". What's missing there is "Open link in this tab", to circumvent these pesky websites that configure every single link to open in a new tab/window.
No, what you see online is a digital representation of a physical product. What you see on the lot is an actual physical product that can be touched and smelled.
So far, majority of the functions in the Scala course homework have been one-liners. Mostly without any new variables that one could name. This kind of problems, a lot of people write the exactly same answer, down to every single character.
Good to know. I bought it.

On the Nexus 7 the formatting is good. Even on the smallest font, you can't get much code on the screen. But most of the code snippets are small and it works.

On the Kindle for PC app it looks great.

On the Cloud Reader (read.amazon.com) it is still awful.And maybe there is nothing you can do about that.

Anyway, thanks for all the hard work. Look forward to reading it.
Notman is an awesome place for hackers in Montreal and I'm glad they plan to double the events space. More hacking with more breathing room. Can't go wrong with this! ;)
It was very well said by gwf: This is a race to the bottom in terms of sustainable pricing. I love the free plan but who knows how it'll play long term.
It's quite nice looking. Nice job guys!
Yes, it would be nice if someone from the team behind NSQ elaborates a bit on why they didn't go with an existing protocol like MQTT.
This ensures that the only edge case that would result in message loss is an unclean shutdown of an nsqd process. In that case, any messages that were in memory (or any buffered writes not flushed to disk) would be lost.

I don't understand how you can call it a message delivery "guarantee" when you're susceptible to losing messages when a node dies.

One solution is to stand up redundant nsqd pairs (on separate hosts) that receive copies of the same portion of messages.

OK, delivery is only guaranteed if I run multiple independent sets of NSQd and write messages to both.

Regardless, it looks like an interesting project.
I find it impressive that they can find that tiny thing. I imagine it is some image processing algorithm that identifies anomalies in the texture. Or do they have humans scanning through each full res picture?
It's interesting to find that "enterprise drives" performed worse than consumer. Recently, a report came from a Microsoft datacenter, where they found most errors weren't from faulty hardware, but firmware incompatibilities between array controller and drive controller. I wonder if this type of incompatibility occurs more often for enterprise drives than consumer.
They should only get disabled if the use a feature that got removed.